Once You Go This Far Page 6

  I sat there and listened to them shoot the shit for a while, growing increasingly tired of them. If Metcalf’s goal had been to bore me to death, it just might work. When the entrées came, I stood up and thanked them for the company, since obviously nothing of substance would be discussed in my presence.

  It was almost seven when Metcalf finally came out of the restaurant, and I followed him at a safe distance, but he just went home to a stone house in Sylvania on a wedge-shaped property. I lingered on the main road and used my binoculars to see what he was up to, which turned out to be watching Fox News with his pants unbuckled.

  “Great,” I muttered, and pulled a U-turn and sped away.

  CHAPTER 8

  The motel I had checked in to that afternoon had felt vaguely cheery with natural light, but now that the sun was going down it seemed a little bleak. I sat at the small wooden desk and flipped open my notebook to the number that belonged to the hissing woman Rebecca had apparently been calling. I briefly wondered about Lindy, Keir Metcalf’s secretary, who seemed more than capable of hissing. But when I dialed the number from my cell phone this time, it rang and went to voice mail, no recorded name.

  “Hi,” I said into the ether, “my name is Roxane West and I’m calling from The Columbus Dispatch, working on a piece about Ohio women, and I was given your name as someone who may be interested in sharing her story.” Everybody had a story, and most folks were pretty eager to share it. I was hoping that the mysterious hissing woman would be one of them.

  I looked through the rest of my meager collection of clues—the cashout slip from Caesars in Windsor and the parking voucher from Detroit. It was late enough to call it a day, but too early to call it a night, so I decided to follow up on these two items instead of spending the remaining hours of the evening in the bleak motel room with my thoughts.

  I’d been to Windsor once before, back in college, in the days before you needed a passport and could get across the border with whatever you had in your wallet. You could also drink and gamble there at nineteen, which appealed to my rebel streak, and casinos seemed exotic and forbidden, since we didn’t have any in the area anyway. Now they were all over Ohio, so the temptation for random border-crossing by today’s youth was no doubt vastly reduced.

  I parked on the sixth floor of the parking garage and looked out. The huge red Caesars sign shone pinkly on the brackish river below. In my recollection of the place, the Canadian side of things featured the casino, an all-night Chinese restaurant, and not much else. But now I saw it was far more expansive than I remembered, with high-rise hotels, a waterside garden—grey in the fading daylight—and a massive attached arena. It was raining softly and not many people were out. Across the water, the gap-toothed Detroit skyline looked like something from another time period with its gritty old buildings, so unlike the modern glass landscape of Windsor itself.

  Although I’d had the hour-long drive from Toledo—plus twenty minutes spent in line for Customs—to think of a plan for once I got here, I hadn’t come up with anything better than simply wandering around. So I wandered across the gold and red gambling floor of the casino slowly, hoping something would occur to me in the noisy space. The massive banks of slot machines were a third full, maybe less, but the lights and carnival-ride sounds of it all gave the illusion of vibrance, simultaneously sensory overload and sensory deprivation—all casinos were like this, and I could have imagined I was anywhere.

  I would not have said no to a comped whiskey from a cocktail waitress. But like the casinos at home, and unlike Vegas, the booze wasn’t free. I settled for a Coke, changed a twenty-dollar bill for twenty-six Canadian, and mindlessly pulled the lever on a slot machine called Diamond Dust for a few minutes, or seconds, really, since that was all it took to run through it. The next time a waitress passed by, I flagged her down and showed her a photo of Rebecca on my phone.

  “I was just wondering, have you seen my friend around here?”

  She gave the image a cursory glance. “I’ve barely seen anybody here tonight. It’s dead.”

  “I don’t mean tonight. I mean, is she someone you’ve seen here regularly?”

  Now she looked annoyed. “How am I supposed to remember that?”

  “Maybe you’re not. It was just a question. Her name is Rebecca Newsome.”

  She studied the photo again. “She looks like a real nice lady but I’ve never seen her.”

  Something had rippled through her face, though, a faint flick of her eyes to something above us.

  After she walked away, I looked up; she had glanced at the beady round eye of a security camera.

  * * *

  The security operations office was on the ground floor of the casino, near a giant buffet that smelled of prime rib and Italian dressing, and was cleverly disguised as a lost-and-found. No one was at the little counter, but the mirrored wall behind it no doubt contained a room full of surveillance equipment—i.e., answers to at least some of my questions.

  But even if I managed to convince someone to allow me to take a look at security footage, there was no telling how long it would take to find Rebecca on the screen, or if it would even yield any useful information if I did. I wandered away from the desk and used my phone to pull up LinkedIn, where I searched for security director Caesars Windsor.

  Who happened to be a man named Barry Newsome.

  * * *

  I called the main casino number and asked for the man, but he wasn’t in this evening. That was fine with me; I was just happy to have an angle to pursue. Maggie had indicated that her father was long out of the picture, but it seemed like that might not be true.

  Hoping to make it two for two, I drove back through the tunnel and stopped at the St. Clair Club, the place where Rebecca had parked at some recent point.

  I pulled to a stop at the curb. A guy in a blue-green windbreaker emblazoned VALET came up to my window. “Good evening, ma’am,” he said.

  I looked up at the building I was parked beside. I could make out red brick and a dark-colored stairway awning.

  I put the window down. “Hi. What is this place?”

  “Are you dining with us or staying?”

  “Is this a restaurant?”

  The guy looked mildly offended. “This is the St. Clair Club, ma’am.”

  “Which is?”

  Headlights flashed in my rearview mirror and the valet guy glanced behind me. “Are you valeting your vehicle this evening?”

  “Sure,” I said. I gave him my name and watched as he scribbled it down on one end of a tear-off valet ticket. He detached the other end and gave me a spiel about allowing fifteen minutes to have my car brought around. “I have a question.”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you keep a record of which vehicles are parked here and when?”

  “A record?”

  “Like if I had a valet ticket from a few weeks ago and I wanted to know when exactly it had been used.”

  “So, wait, you have been here before?”

  “No, I’m just curious. If you have a system for keeping track of that info.”

  The valet guy nodded at a key cabinet mounted underneath a podium that sat just below the awning. “That’s our system.”

  I thanked him and went up the steps. A doorman in a black suit over a black dress shirt opened up for me. “Good evening, madam.”

  Madam, now. My, my. Once inside the door, I was standing in a two-story lobby done up in dark, polished wood and plush blue velvet. To the right were a hotelesque counter and a bank of gilded elevators that looked like they might contain white-gloved operators. To the left, a hostess stand and a coat check, behind which was a curtained doorway that led to a restaurant from the sound of it, although I couldn’t see it. The counter to the right was unattended, so I opted for the restaurant.

  The hostess intercepted me, smiling politely. “Good evening, madam.” The smile, bulletproofed by the kind of long-wear lipstick that you have to use olive oil and sandpaper to remove, stayed in pl
ace. “May I suggest that you may be more comfortable if you went back up to your room and changed?”

  “Pardon?”

  “We don’t allow denim in our dining room.” She pointed to a small framed card on her podium: THE RESTAURANT AT THE ST. CLAIR CLUB APPRECIATES YOUR ADHERENCE TO OUR BUSINESS-CASUAL DRESS CODE.

  “What exactly is business casual?”

  “Our female dinner guests typically feel the most comfortable in a dress or a skirt.”

  I said, “Do they, now.”

  I had a pair of black pants back in the motel room, but not in the car. I sighed and thanked her and went over to the hotel counter instead. Still empty. I peered over the ledge and found the countertop to be conspicuously clean; a computer screen featured a bouncing-ball screensaver, which flipped to a login gateway when I may have nudged the mouse a tiny bit. A bin on the floor, labeled OUTGOING MAIL, contained windowpane envelopes—probably credit-card bills for a bunch of executives who didn’t want their wives seeing what they bought and wondering who it was for—and a dozen or so white padded envelopes with neatly typed addresses. The only papers on the desk appeared to be application forms for joining this establishment.

  I took one and tried to call the elevator, but it required a room key to do so.

  Opposite the desk was a row of small cubicles, presumably for making private phone calls—but they were all empty.

  Whatever Rebecca had been doing here was going to remain a secret for now.

  * * *

  My motel was on Route 20, across from a Chipotle and a liquor store. The room had barely cost twice the price of a burrito, guac, and three plastic airline bottles of Jim Beam, but the accommodations seemed clean and smelled like laundry soap, which was a far better smell than some motels. I poured one of the whiskeys into my half-full Coke and reflected on my evening as I ate a late dinner.

  One for two wasn’t bad, as far as useful trips go, but I was annoyed that a wardrobe issue had prevented me from getting into the restaurant at the St. Clair Club. I made a point of putting my black corduroys into my computer bag to put into the car in case I found myself going there again. Then I spent a while looking at Barry Newsome’s background: divorced from Rebecca in 1995, remarried to a current wife, Sofia Calvet, a Canadian citizen, also in 1995. It appeared they’d lived in Montreal for a time, then moved to Windsor a decade ago. Barry Newsome had served in the Gulf War, then worked as a security guard at the Toledo Public Library and a string of hotels, worked his way up the ranks in the loss-prevention division of Holt Renfrew, then turned up at the casino.

  It seemed that Rebecca had a type—law enforcement.

  I was reading up on the St. Clair Club when Tom called. “Did you know that private social clubs still exist?” I said by way of hello.

  He was used to me by now and didn’t miss a beat. “Are you saying that you wish to join one?”

  “Are there any in Columbus?”

  “I’m sure. Not that either of us have the right pedigree.”

  “What are you implying about my pedigree?”

  I heard him smile. “So what brings private social clubs to mind?”

  “I was just in this place, the St. Clair in Detroit.”

  “You’re in Detroit?”

  “I was. Also, Windsor. But now I’m back in Toledo.”

  He sighed. “You’re in Toledo.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Should I have told you that I was going?”

  “I don’t know about should, but you might have mentioned it. I was going to stop by your office with Ho Toy.”

  “Shit. Tom, I’m sorry.” It hadn’t occurred to me to tell anybody before I came up here, but I could see his point. Like he’d said the night before, we had fallen into a nice rhythm, one that included frequent dinners together at odd hours in my office. “Garlic chicken with extra green peppers?”

  “I know what you like.”

  “I know you do. I’m sorry—really.”

  “How’s the human-trafficking capital of Ohio?”

  I winced in the semidark. “Toledo?”

  “Yes. It’s the proximity to the border. You probably saw how easy it is to get over the border and back just today.”

  “It used to be even easier.”

  “Yeah, it did. I remember once, when I was in college, I got across with a student ID and a Sears card.”

  I laughed out loud. “Like a store credit card?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you even have a Sears credit card in college?”

  “A girl told me I needed to stop dressing like Kurt Cobain’s gardener if I wanted to get any traction with her.”

  I was sipping my drink when he said it and I almost snorted. “You’ve always been a lady-killer.”

  I heard the smile in his voice from a hundred miles away. “When are you coming home?”

  “Soon.”

  “Will I talk to you before then, or are you just going to show up here at some point?”

  “Hard to say.” I cracked open another of the airplane whiskey bottles. The tiny mouth made it impossible to drink it fast, giving me the sense of admirable restraint. “No, I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Rebecca’s boss was named Sharon Coombs, and she was the Horizons Academy’s vice principal. We went to her office, which resembled mine in its unfinishedness. “This is my first year in the school administration,” she explained. “I taught English here for almost twenty years.”

  “Congratulations.”

  Sharon shrugged. She wore her greying hair in neat box braids and no makeup. Despite the greying hair, her warm brown skin was unlined. “It’s bittersweet, to be honest. It’s been a difficult school year already. What happened to Rebecca is just terrible. For many of us, personally, of course, plus she was really beloved by the students. So it has been hard, trying to act strong for them when really I just feel like bawling every time I see the flowers kids are putting down there by her office. Maggie really thinks that someone … did this?”

  “She just wants to be sure,” I said. I was sitting on a small, low-to-the-ground love seat, probably the scene of many tough conversations. I could see no fewer than five tissue boxes in Sharon’s office. “She was about to have her baby when it happened. Now Maggie is worried she missed something. There are definitely some questions.”

  “Well, I don’t know what I can do to help, but I’d sure like to try.”

  “The police never spoke to you?”

  Sharon shook her head. Her earrings made a faint rustling sound. “Should they have?”

  “I don’t know. It’s true that it did appear to be an accident from the get-go, but it only takes a minute to make a phone call. Any chance someone else from the school would have spoken with them?”

  “No, I would have heard about it. We’ve been having weekly meetings with the whole staff. Someone would have mentioned it. But I don’t think there’s anything we could have said that would be useful, though. Rebecca had been off for the previous week or so.” Sharon smiled. “She felt so bad, asking for two weeks off right when the academic year had just started. But she never takes time off.” The smile faltered; I could tell she was mentally correcting the verb tense.

  “So she didn’t have any problems here at school?”

  “No, not at all. I know it’s a cliché to say she was universally beloved, but I mean, she was. Kids would talk to her about things they’d never bring up to an English teacher, say, or the administration. She just had this openness.”

  “Any particular kids?”

  Her expression turned ever so slightly stern. “I can’t talk particulars about our students, of course.”

  “Right, of course. But no problems?”

  “None.”

  “Can you tell me anything about Rebecca’s divorce?”

  Sharon looked uneasy.

  “Maggie told me her version, but maybe you have a slightly different point of view as Rebecca’s friend.”

 
; “Well…” She trailed off, debating. “Rebecca was on her own for such a long time. When she told me she was going to marry Keir, I remember being surprised. He seemed like a perfectly nice man but I was just surprised that she’d want to uproot her life for him at that point.”

  “Uproot how?”

  “Oh, like how they had to live in his house, some place up by the lake. I just remember Rebecca being disappointed that they weren’t going to get a new place together, that she had to move to his place. And I know he wasn’t happy that she kept her house and rented it out, rather than selling. I don’t know. I saw less of her after they got married, too.”

  “Was he controlling?”

  “I don’t know if it was controlling so much, just, the pairing seemed unlikely. Rebecca was no bra-burning feminist or anything but Keir was traditional, I guess that’s the word.”

  “And Rebecca wasn’t?”

  “I’m not sure how to explain it. Her faith was very important to her—to both of them. She belonged to the Keystone Christian Fellowship and I believe that was how they met. But over time I think Rebecca started turning a bit more moderate in her beliefs. For example, she didn’t take his last name—I remember her talking about that. For her it wasn’t a statement or anything, because Newsome, that was her first husband’s name. But after so many years, it became her name. You know? She didn’t want to do that again, the identity change.”

  I nodded. “The first ex-husband, he still in the picture?”

  Sharon shook her head. “Not that she ever mentioned.”

  “Was Keir ever violent? Emotionally abusive?”

  Her expression went a little shocked. “No, nothing like that. He’s a very friendly guy, almost too friendly. You know how some men can be. They don’t know how to turn it off. That was the impression I always had of him.” She cocked her head as something else occurred to her. “But like I said, she started socializing a lot less, after they got married. I thought part of it was that his house was so far out, it made for a long commute to come to work, a long drive just to have dinner on a weekend or whatever. I guess that could be its own kind of abuse. Isolation?”